


Oak and Ash

by aderyn



Series: Deep Map [15]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Episode: s01e01 A Study in Pink, Episode: s01e03 The Great Game, Episode: s02e01 A Scandal in Belgravia, Episode: s02e03 The Reichenbach Fall, The Adventure of the Empty House, murder & pillage & lost hearts, old trees & great fires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-28
Updated: 2013-01-28
Packaged: 2017-11-27 05:13:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/658369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s sacked the city many times in his dreams.</p>
<p>He’s lost his heart quietly, three times.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Oak and Ash

**Author's Note:**

> For [BlackMorgan](http://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackMorgan/pseuds/BlackMorgan), with thanks for the oak door and the red ash.  
> Thank you to [Saki101](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Saki101/pseuds/Saki101) for the spark, and to [Quarryquest](http://quarryquest.livejournal.com/) for the weeping angels.

_“Great fire burning  
You supplied the spark”—Andy Partridge  &  XTC_

London’s been sacked too many times-Vikings and Normans and Boudica the queen with her red ash and Sherlock Holmes in his wildest dreams.

Once when he’s ten, a raider cresting the Thamesflood, seeping through the underground to pillage the towers of the downtown.

Once when he’s twenty, higher than fuck, chortling, twisting and shouting down the high street for the hordes that never come; he’s his own horde,serpentine, snakes twining up his arms, lovely snake transformed into bird. Liftoff.

Once when he’s thirty, higher than fuck, chortling, twisting and shouting down the high street onto his first real crime scene. Solves it in seconds. Liftoff.  

He floats into the graveyard, crosses the bones, walks out again.

Blows through the oaken door on Baker, begins again.

John knows the stories, knows; it’s the heart of the city he’s after, still.

*****

They go to the graveyard shoulder to shoulder, two bodies in a graveyard, weeping angels, runnels of blood, an old tree and a burnt monument.

“Lot of blood,” John says. Blood on the ground, the ground getting up a thirst for it, the killing fields of his nightmares and Sherlock’s hand on his clavicle and the ash and the oak and the red desert flower.

*****

The heart’s like wood, carvable, flammable.

John listens at the clinic.

John listens at a door.

John touches a match to the pile in their grate, rubs his wrists.

John puts a hand to the gate of the ribs.

Tells Sherlock, _breathe; I hear you; breathe._

**_*_ **

_Ash,_ Sherlock writes, _tree of life, can be burned green, turned and tooled into useful things, the shaft of an arrow, the grip of a gun._

“John,” Sherlock says, smiling,“dendrochronology indicates you’ve been around longer than I thought.”

_We might have been burnt down and built up again, grown up again, the bodies of insects smoking in our bones._

 He’d never say anything like that. He’d leave it to the poets, to the whittlers, to the bloggers, leave his digits like twigs in John’s hand, leave his tongue, a quick fork of flame.

*****

Lost, away, dead, Sherlock flicks notes in carmine like drops of his own.

_Recoverable heat value of …_

_Heartwood, builds and burns best._

_Bart’s-it stopped, re-started._

_Pool-sights like red phosphor, your face._

_It stopped._

_Riverbank, three degrees shy of a quagmire-sank._

_Rooftop-pitched it right off._

_London-lost count._

_John._

_How many times._

He burns them to ash, the two hundred forty-fourth kind, in a dish.

*****

It took London down, the Great Fire, all those timber-built blocks, twenty-house gaps leapt, wind eating the firebreaks, only the Bridge parting Southwark from the blaze.

One spark, John thinks, walking.

So much of the lost city left to see, John thinks, so much to remember, to re-ignite.

_Fire, Sherlock said once, reveals, no, exposes._

_I’m not a writer but it lays bare._

*****

Sherlock has lost his heart quietly, three times.

Once when he’s ten and he really sees the city for the first time, his eye on the alley and the skip, skip.

Once when he’s twenty and he _really_ sees the city for the first time, breath rising from the pavement at shoe-level, flares of pain in the vessels of his eyes, the soft exhalations of the ash on Montague, in the locked chamber of his left ventricle.

Once when he’s thirty-five and suddenly thirty-eight-–floating  again on the sediments of the city, breathing again on the chalk and the coal, while under his feet all the former fires leap into life with his hand on the door.

 

**Author's Note:**

> [Ash trees of London](http://www.wildlondon.org.uk/News/why-londoners-should-celebrate-the-extraordinary-ash)   
> [Boudica the queen](http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Boudica.html)   
> [Roman London](http://www.history.co.uk/explore-history/history-of-london/the-port-of-Londinium.html)   
> [The Great Fire of London](http://www.london-fire.gov.uk/TheGreatFireOfLondon.asp)   
> [Montague Street with tree](http://www.flickr.com/photos/buzzwax/3967499739/)   
> [“Great Fire” by XTC](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGvAdnOg8IM)


End file.
